math teachers need to actually know their math; they can’t get away with just being “coaches” and “facilitators”!
Absolutely. If your math is not solid, and the child comes up with an unexpected idea, you can’t provide a valuable “coaching” in return.
Unfortunately, school is what it is, and teachers are what they are, including math teachers. I guess in short term you have to accept that math teachers are often incompetent in math as a fact about the world, and try to minimize the damage. :( And perhaps the long-term plan is that the next generation brought up using this method will have more math-competent math teachers.
the overall method still needs to be tested empirically
In progress, as far as I know. At least the last time I heard about it, they were testing the method on a randomly selected group of Czech elementary schools.
Absolutely. If your math is not solid, and the child comes up with an unexpected idea, you can’t provide a valuable “coaching” in return.
Unfortunately, school is what it is, and teachers are what they are, including math teachers. I guess in short term you have to accept that math teachers are often incompetent in math as a fact about the world, and try to minimize the damage. :( And perhaps the long-term plan is that the next generation brought up using this method will have more math-competent math teachers.
In progress, as far as I know. At least the last time I heard about it, they were testing the method on a randomly selected group of Czech elementary schools.